In this mini-lesson, students analyze soil moisture quantities associated with Hurricane Harvey around Houston, Texas on August 25, 2017.

Explore using units for calculations with Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). NDVI is a ratio of different light wavelength reflectance which can be used to map the density of green vegetation.

The fires in Greece during the summer of 2007 devastated large tracks of forest and ground cover in this Mediterranean region. Students analyze these data to determine the scale, area, and percentage of the forest impacted by of these fires.

This mini lesson engages students with answering questions on cause and effect relationships by watching a NASA video related to changing forests in the Pacific Northwest from 1984 to 2011.

Students review the NASA video showing biosphere data over the North Atlantic Ocean as a time series animation displaying a decade of phytoplankton blooms and answer questions.

Students review a video that models the global impact of smoke from fires to develop an understanding of how models can be used to interpret and forecast phenomena in the Earth System. 

Students learn how to estimate the "energy efficiency" of photosynthesis, or the amount of energy that plants absorb for any given location on Earth. This is the ratio of the amount of energy stored to the amount of light energy absorbed and is used to evaluate and model photosynthesis efficiency.

Compare a histogram and map to determine the differences in the information conveyed in each data display.

Learners will analyze and interpret a box plot and evaluate the spread of the data. Learners will compare it with a different visualization of the data to see how the two compare, discuss the limitations of the two types of data displays and formulate questions.

Interpret a scatter plot to find patterns in the number of tropical cyclones from 1842 to 2018.